While Intel continues to ignore our plea to jump on the USB 3.0 bandwagon and get the SuperSpeed spec rolling in full force, NEC is taking matters into its own hands and will reportedly cut prices for its first- and second-gen USB 3.0 chips in 4Q10. These are being described as "significant" price cuts, while the company's next-gen SuperSpeed chips will start shipping in the first quarter of 2011 for less than $2 a piece.

NEC, which currently holds a 90 percent share of the USB 3.0 market, is just one of several manufactures pushing SuperSpeed chips into motherboard makers' hands. ASMedia (an Asus subsidiary), VIA, Etron, and Fresco Logic have all introduced price cuts of their own, with ASMedia dipping all the way down to $1.7 per chip for bulk orders.

As for next-gen USB 3.0 parts, NEC's upcoming chips will reportedly feature higher performance, lower power consumption, and mainstream price points. There's talk that this pricing strategy will cut into NEC's profits, but the bulk of that will be offset from IP licensing fees, including that from bigwig clients like AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.

Tom Halfhill, formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and now an analyst for Microprocessor Report, wrote in an interesting piece (as he always does) in the currently shipping August issue of Maximum PC magazine (perhaps you've heard of this rag?) on how Apple's iPad is doing Intel a favor. Halfhill argues that even though Apple snubbed x86 in favor of ARM's architecture for its iPad, the iPad will generate demand for low-power x86 chipsets.

"Intel is trying to push x86 processors into cell phones, where ARM's lower-power processors reign supreme," Halfhill writes. "Intel's latest attempt is an Atom-based chipset code-named Moorestown... Moorestown will be an ARM-breaker for high-end smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices."

Halfhill brings up some excellent points, which makes today's announcement that Microsoft has signed a new agreement to license technology for the ARM processor architecture all the more interesting.

Hit the jump to find out what this means for Microsoft, ARM, and Intel.

Reports have begun to surface that Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors are going to be poor overclockers, allowing for only 2-3 percent of OCing headroom before the platform falls flat on its face.

The reason for this is because all of the system buses are going to be tied together in Sandy Bridge, including USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, and so forth. The way things work now is you're able to goose additional MHz out of your CPU and memory without affecting other subsets, but that apparently won't be the case with Sandy Bridge, which will use a single internal clock generator linking all the buses together.

As Bit-Tech reports it, at least one Taiwanese motherboard company warned that cranking the Base Clock by just 5MHz is enough to throw a wrench into the whole operation, causing the USB to fail and corrupt the SATA bus.

It's still early, however, and mobo makers could come up with workarounds, but so far it doesn't appear as though Intel is too interested in lending a hand.

In an attempt to curb the rash of worker suicides that have rocked Foxconn so far in 2010, parent company Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. said in June that it plans to raise employee wages., more than doubling the monthly basic worker pay rate to 2,000 yuan ($293).

To help offset the increased wages, Foxconn, which makes iPhones and other name-brand electronics for companies like Apple, HP, and others, plans to charge those customers more, Hon Hai Precision Industry VP C.L. Huang said during a news conference earlier this week.

Foxconn is now the world's largest manufacturer of electronic goods, but has fallen under fire in recent months following no less than 10 worker suicides at one of the company's facilities in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, calling into question Foxconn's labor conditions.

What this means for the home consumer remains to be seen. Apple, for example, is selling iPads and iPhones as quickly as Foxconn can produce them and is in a good position to absorb the higher manufacturing costs.

Tablets might be the talk of the tech industry, but according to market research firm ABI Research, netbooks still rule the roost. Some 60 million netbooks are expected to ship around the globe in 2011, says ABI Research, and by 2013 ABI predicts that number will double.

That's good news for Acer, the biggest netbook player in terms of market share, and one of just six vendors who dominate the netbook market with a 78 percent stake. Asus, meanwhile, has lost some ground, giving up half of its market share in 2009 after running neck-and-neck with Acer in 2008.

"Instead of having a preeminent two, it looks as if only Acer will continue to maintain its commanding lead, but at the same time there are more vendors competing head-to-head," notes principal analyst Jeff Orr. "Most of the other major names -- HP, Dell, Lenovo -- increased their market shares in 2009, while Samsung lost a couple of percentage points."

According to Orr, while netbooks continue to flood the landscape, we can expect to see "consolidation through attrition" as companies which aren't heavily invested in netbooks start to exit the market.

Don't feel bad if your broadband provider is giving you the cold shoulder, you're not alone. According to Broadbandchoices, some 46 percent of complaints never get resolved, and that's actually better than last year's numbers.

"The number of respondents that told us that their complaint was not resolved successfully improved since our survey last year when over half (54 percent) of complaints were going unresolved, but broadband providers still have work to do if they are to win back customer confidence," said Michael Phillips, product director at Broadbandchoices.co.uk.

Confidence in their broadband provider isn't something consumers seem to have. Of those who chose not to complain about one issue or another, 39 percent said they felt it would be too much of a hassle, while more than a third -- 34 percent -- said they didn't think their broadband provider would do anything about it.

It looks like all those Windows 7-based 'Slate 500' listings buried on HP's website weren't an oversight, after all, and the company may still proceed with plans to release the anticipated tablet.

"We are in customer evaluations now and will make a determination soon on the next steps," HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak told InfoWorld.

When HP picked up Palm and, by association, the 's webOS platform, most analysts believed it was the end of the road for a Windows 7 tablet. But it's now looking more likely than ever that both units will co-exist in the market place.

"We hadn't anticipated the Palm acquisition when we first shared our plans for that product," Somsak explained.

Less certain is exactly where HP plans to market the Slate 500. John Spooner, an analyst with Technology Business Research, says that "based on the hardware specifications, it could go either way," referring to whether HP would sell the Slate to home consumers or enterprises.

The 5-inch Dell Streak mini-tablet is only days away from its U.S. launch, according to its recently updated product page. Dell has begun accepting pre-orders for the smartphone-tablet hybrid, with general retail availability set for late July.

Available in the UK for more than a month now, the Android-based Streak is a cross between a smartphone (or a superphone) and a tablet. The Streak features a 5MP rear camera, a front-facing VGA camera, 3G, Wi-Fi and A-GPS. Be careful though, you might just have a little trouble explaining your choice of form factor to your pals.

PowerColor today announced its LCS HD 5870 V2, an upgraded version of the original LCS HD 5870 that now "features unprecedented factory overclocked settings."

Calling it "unprecedented" might be stretching things a tad, but not by much. With the GPU factory overclocked to 950MHz, the LCS HD 5870 V2 matches Gigabyte's GV-R587SO Edition card, the only other HD 5870 GPU we spotted on Newegg clocked higher than 900MHz. More surprising, however, is PowerColor's decision not to goose the memory, which comes clocked at 4,800MHz, or 200MHz slower than the original LCS.

Like the previous version, only water cooling gurus need apply. The LCS HD 5870 V2 comes equipped with high-flow 3/8-inch and 1/2-inch fittings with captured o-rings to help prevent leakage.

"We got very positive feedback from the first version of the LCS HD 5870," said Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation. "Now we released an upgraded version with factory overclocked settings and offer a cool working environment. We're sure that it will exceed expectations from gamers."

As with most of PowerColor's HD 5870 line, this newest release will come bundled with a Dirt 2 coupon, though the company didn't say when this will hit retail or for how much.

After a rough start to the summer, motherboard manufacturers are seeing sales pick up this this month and have turned optimistic about the third-quarter. Shipments are on pace to grow 20 percent on month in July, and if things continue this way, shipments will grow 15-20 percent sequentially for the quarter.

This is a far different picture than the gloom and doom scenario top-tier motherboard makers were painting just a short time ago. But as demand has started to pick up in Europe and China, so has their confidence that they'll be able to move more boards than previously thought.

So far this year, Asus has shipped roughly 10.3 million of its own-branded boards, followed by Gigabyte with 8.4 million units. ECS shipped the third most boards with 4.4 million units, followed by MSI and ASRock (a subsidiary of Asus) at 3.8 million and 3.9 million units, respectively.